I’ve written before about how one of the Engagement team’s big goals is to make sure that the meaning behind Firefox comes through in our marketing. In other words, we want people to understand that we (Mozilla) aren’t like our competitors in terms of our mission, motivation or the way we do business, and that the products we make reflect those differences. We know that the more people understand that, the more favorably they’re inclined to view us, so it’s an important concept to communicate.

With that in mind, we launched a new campaign today to share our people-powered values more clearly and boldly through the download process on our website. The Firefox download page (for non-users…people using the latest version of Firefox see a different page) has been updated with a new look and new messaging to reflect these values. In particular, I really like the bold use of orange (a good color for us) and the collage of Mozillians in the background. The same theme continues on the download confirmation and first run pages to give new users a consistent experience.

For now this campaign is in en-US only (although we’re working to expand it to other locales) and doesn’t extend to the rest of the site. But, if it goes well I could see variations of this look used in other areas as well. I think the photography in particular is a nice visual metaphor for how we’re different from the other guys. Plus, look carefully…you might even see someone you know!

The One Mozilla website project continues! After merging the mozilla.com domain into mozilla.org, we’re now starting the process to update mozilla.org’s visual design with a new and improved look.

A Bit of Background:
The current mozilla.org template dates back to 2009, and was refined further last year. But, since then the Mozilla universe has continued to expand, and we want to make sure our visual design style grows along with it. Now that the merge process is complete the next step is to ensure a consistent user experience no matter where the user clicks.

Mozilla.org’s Role:
Although the individual products will continue to be hosted on their own sub-sections within our web universe, the root mozilla.org site is a key hub and starting point for all that Mozilla has to offer. Here are a few of the roles that mozilla.org serves:
* a place to tell the story Mozilla’s mission crisply and cleanly. (Note: historically, this portion of the site has only been represented in U.S. English, so we plan on fixing that with this project.)
* an important entry point for community members to learn about ways to get involved.
* the jumping off point for discovering products like Firefox (for both desktop and mobile) and Thunderbird, as well as upcoming offerings around apps, identity and Boot2Gecko plus innovations from Mozilla Labs and more.

The Process, Next Steps, & Getting Involved:
In August, we conducted a series of stakeholder surveys among the site’s core contributors, and are also running a short survey on mozilla.org to better understand what users are looking for. We’ll use the results from both to inform the design and content creation process on the site.

We’ve also launched the One Mozilla blog, where we’ll be posting updates about both the visual and technical elements of the site’s progress. We haven’t posted there much yet, but things should start picking up there in the next few weeks, and even more in the new year. Please follow along there if you’re at all interested in this project…we’re definitely counting on input from Mozillians around the world as we go.

If you have any questions please feel free to post them here in the comments section and I’ll do my best to answer them. Otherwise, stay tuned for design mockups and more coming soon!